Companion Approval
Companion approval gives each party member a private opinion of the player that rises and falls with choices, gating conversations, side quests, romances and sometimes whether they stay at all.
Each recruitable character carries a hidden number. Dialogue choices, quest outcomes and even which companions you bring along nudge it up or down, and crossing a threshold unlocks a personal quest, a confession, a romance, or a departure in the middle of an act. Because the value is usually invisible, players read approval through reaction lines, which turns companions into ongoing puzzles rather than static bundles of statistics and equipment.
BioWare added the system to Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn in 2000 to fix a problem left by its predecessor, whose party was six competent mercenaries with no interior life. Giving each companion opinions, quarrels and a personal storyline made recruitment a choice about company rather than about statistics. It also cost little structurally, since approval is a counter attached to dialogue nodes the studio was already writing.
Approval turned party members into the reason many people replay, and it introduced a durable design problem at the same time. Optimising affection encourages players to answer as they believe a character wants rather than as they mean, and writers have responded by hiding the meter, adding companions who dislike flattery, or letting relationships simply fail. Romance content in particular draws criticism for treating intimacy as a lock with a known key.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 2 steps deep, beginning with Branching Dialogue Trees in 1985.
Descends directly from
Forked into
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic tied approval to alignment, Dragon Age: Origins let companions leave outright, and Baldur's Gate 3 had them react to nearly every scene.
Carried forward by 12 later games
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Also called: affinity system, approval rating, relationship meter